Do you think formal education is necessary to gain strong programming skills? There are a lot of jobs that aren't programming but involves programming, such as tech artists in games, fx tds in film ...

It all started from here. I have been following Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art (Best Practices (Microsoft)). The third chapter says that in Software Management:
You cannot give too ...

I'm a self-taught programmer. No sort of formal CS courses, just someone that read a book about programming and now does that thing for some fun.
However, I don't know much. I've learnt too much from ...

I am a strange sort of a programmer. I am a software engineer by profession and I have written programs in more than one language in various capacities. I know quite a bit about various programming ...

I'm enrolled in grad school and this summer we're tasked with a series of projects that should include implementations of design patterns from a couple of textbooks. Our first project is for one of a ...

I am a first year computer science major. I went to a job fair, handed out resumes, much to my surprise I got an interview and eventually an internship as a developer. I explained to the interviewer ...

I know many programming languages ,skills and concepts in very basic, such as PHP, Java, Object-oriented technology.
Using PHP, I can build a simple website with CRUD, login function.
Using Java, I ...

I'm trying to bring more structure in my worklife by trying to maintain my 'knowledge' of new techniques/bugfixes/workarounds. I find them on google (sometimes after a while of searching) and fix my ...

I've worked in team-based environments most of my career, but not as a programmer. (I am trained as a musician/composer.) I'm becoming aware of programming specific team-based concepts, though--slowly ...

I've already been programming for quite some time and have a firm grasp on programming itself, OOP, and a few other programming related things. However, I'm interested in learning the same things that ...

As many of you must have noticed, learning to program is not an overnight thing, it takes years of hard work (I really should refer here to this wonderful article of Peter Norvig). But there's a lot ...

I'm a programmer with a two-hour round trip commute to work each day. I'd like to fill some of that time with audiobooks about software development. Any audiobooks that would help me become a better ...

This is probably a very difficult question to answer, because of its subjectivity, but even a vague guess would help me out: Now that Khan Academy is beginning to offer Computer Science lectures I'm ...

I'm a self-taught programmer. I am honestly not good in math. What advice you can give to improve my Mathematical skills so that I will not be so insecure around my fellow programmers? What are the ...

How and where can I learn more about financial data feeds? I'm specifically interested in learning how feeds are implemented, i.e. are feeds implemented as SOAP/RESTful Web Services? Or if they are ...

One of the major regrets in life is that I didn't do something with my introversion. I didn't manage to get past the first year of college because of that. I have chosen the path where there are no ...

I have a friend who is struggling with learning how to program (he wants to make games; as do I). Several books, tutorials, etc.
His mentality is he has to memorize the code itself, as in the exact ...